> In fact, aside from the profusion of variables with unhelpful names, the C translation of Lovelace’s program doesn’t look that alien at all.
Clearly the author never met my coworkers.
Clearly the author never met my coworkers.
I HAD to of course name all of my variables as poets and poems.
So you have "Edgar_Allen gets new The_Road_Not_Taken", all was fine during my tests but for some reason it did not interface well with the code provided by the teacher to do the actual input so I had to take it to the TA for help.
I then learnt why descriptive names, not just comments are helpful. Although, the TA was impressed by my selections XD
Like my dad (A chemical engineer) learned to program in FORTRAN, which used to insist variable names were 1 letter and up to 2 digits. He later learned Basic, but his code was still spiritually FORTRAN so the one-letter-two digits thing stuck. I thought that was just him but then much later I went to work on Wall St and had to work with quants who were copying code out of "Numerical Recipes" and it was exactly the same just now in C.
Still amazed that the nearly-incomprehensible code (and the port) worked
Incidentally, the various Autocode languages of the 1950s in Britain had 1-character variable names.
(I suspect the latter)